Extending Court-Protected Legal Person Status to Non-Human Entities

Abstract

(...) In recent years, formal advocacy to establish legal rights justiciable in courts of law for non-human entities has breached the confines of the animal world. In 2014, passage of the Te Urewera Act by the parliament of New Zealand, following negotiations with indigenous Maori groups, ceded the government’s formal ownership of an 821- square-mile national park and granted via statute the corresponding land the status of a legal entity with “all the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person.” The outcome deferred to the Maori worldview in which human beings identify themselves as coextensive with nature, in this instance the land comprising the park. At the time, the minister of Maori affairs described the settlement as “a profound alternative to the human presumption of sovereignty over the natural world.” On 30 August 2012, the government of New Zealand and a representative of the Whanganui River iwi, an indigenous Maori group, signed a preliminary agreement, the final version of which was passed into law on 15 March 2017. Under the terms of the treaty settlement, the Whanganui River, New Zealand’s third longest, is granted under its Maori name, Te Awa Tutua, the legal status of a person with all the rights, duties and liabilities that attach to that status, including the right to have a court of law review claims brought on its behalf by two legal guardians tasked in the new law with representing the river. Final passage into law of the agreement concluded the lengthiest litigation in New Zealand’s history; the Whanganui iwi first initiated action seeking legal status for its relationship with the river in the 1870s. The final settlement included NZ$80m for financial redress, $30m for a contestable fund to restore the river to its pristine state, and $1m to anchor its legal framework. (...)